But how does an average fan know which skater "outskated" another? Either they had to have been educated somehow, or else they just made up their own criteria out of thin air.

Suppose you have never seen figure skating before. And then you come across a competition on TV, or at a local rink with a friend who knows what's going on. You're curious, so you ask "What is this sport about? What are the skaters supposed to be doing, and how do they decided who's best?"

Imagine that your friend, or the TV commentators, give one of the following explanations:

1) Skaters skate around and do tricks, like jumps and spins and steps. The jumps are worth the most. Whoever does the hardest tricks best without falling down wins.

2) Skaters are supposed to perform a dance to the music, use the different technical skills they can do on the blades. They get points for some of the difficult skills, but the most important thing is the overall performance.

3) Figure skating is based on different ways of using the human body to control the blades on the ice. The most important things are the edges on the two sides of the blades and the way they make curves around the ice. The specific technical skills are mostly about turning and curving, at speed, and changing between one edge and another. The speed and the strength of the curves are the most important qualities. The most difficult ways to get from one edge to another, or back to the same edge, are to jump up in the air and turn around three or four times in the air before coming down on a backward outside edge. So those jumps are worth the most. But you have to be good at all kinds of different skills -- six different kinds of jump takeoffs, spins on both feet in different positions, and curves and turns and steps that use different parts of the blades and travel and turn in different directions.

Each of those definitions has some truth to it. And each is missing something. So if you learn about the sport from someone who favors one of those definitions, in many events you're going to have a different expectation of who outskated whom than if you had started with a different definition. (That's not even getting into questions of how results from two separate programs should be combined.)

On a multiple choice test the longest answer is always the right one.

As for who skated best in the opinion of the less knowledgable fan, I think if one skater did a bunch of big jumps, and another gave an emotionally satisfying musical interpretation, while a third dazzled with his blade work, that fan would come away from the contest saying, "Well the judges liked this guy's performance the best, but the other two were pretty good, too, in different ways." In fact, this is the best kind of competition to watch -- everyone was good, each by his own measure.

But when someone has multiple falls and other mistakes that even the most casual of fans can't help but notice, that detracts alike from the glory of the big jumps, the effectiveness of the presentation, and the demonstration of blade-to-ice skills.